At the heart of Baby Queen is a tender and joyful relationship between Singaporean drag queen Opera Tang and her 90-year-old grandmother, who makes many of her performance costumes.
15 Nov. 7:00 pm | Innis Town Hall
When 13-year-old Ilyas’s parents yank him out of his comfortable Islamic private school and force him to adjust to life in public school, he develops a plan to change their minds. After a staged fondness for non-halal food and explicit music fails to sufficiently scandalize his parents, Ilyas asks his whip-smart former classmate, Yasmeen, to help devise a more foolproof plan.
12 Nov. 7:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C2
Mariam, a medical student, is dealing with her grandfather’s passing, her grieving mother, and preparing for upcoming exams. When an estranged and suspiciously helpful uncle re-enters their lives and promises support with their property and finances, Mariam senses trouble.
10 Nov. 8:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
You rarely couple poop and romance together, but Okiku and the World does it effortlessly in the most genuine and adorable way.
9 Nov. 8:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C4
When Azra, a queer Muslim grad student, hears of her father’s sudden death, she flies back to her ancestral home in Karachi, Pakistan for the funeral, where she is received by her conservative mother, Mariam, perpetually disappointed by Azra’s choices. As a self-assured Azra wrestles with Karachi’s customs and norms, we time travel back to Mariam’s own life in the city 30 years ago, a remarkably different era in Pakistan’s political and cultural history.
8 Nov. 7:30 pm | Hot Docs Ted Rogers
Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American cinematographer and filmmaker, has always known her mother and grandmother to be women devoted to their Muslim faith. During a trip to Lebanon, Chehab is propelled by a curiosity to understand the quest for love, acceptance, and meaning that brought three generations of women in her family to pledge loyalty to a secretive matriarchal religious order operating clandestinely in the country.
11 Nov. 5:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
Some family stories are so epic they demand telling. Some moments in history require the intimate and inside knowledge of community storytellers. The venerated Chinese Canadian filmmaker Keith Lock narrates the story of how his mother married his father in Australia, who was training with other Chinese Canadian veteran volunteers for the top secret suicide mission, Operation Oblivion.
14 Nov. 7:00 pm | Innis Town Hall
From the team behind Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Reel Asian Official Selection, 2021) comes Junta Yamaguchi’s latest time loop comedy, River. Set in a quaint inn along the Kibune river near Kyoto—a one-street village wedged between a riverbed on one side and mountains on the other—staff and guests find themselves stuck in a continuous two-minute time loop.
10 Nov. 8:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C4
Directed by Meredith Hama-Brown. Judith, a Japanese Canadian woman, and her reluctant white husband attend a week-long couple’s retreat on a coastal British Columbia island, their two daughters in tow. With Judith grieving the recent loss of her mother, and her connection to her Japanese Canadian identity, the couple’s disconnect grows as she finds herself infatuated with another, seemingly perfect, interracial couple at the retreat.
12 Nov. 5:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
Ho-jun, a flailing actor, has found relative success as a social media influencer, hawking fishing hacks. He preps his live stream at his preferred fishing spot, only to be disrupted by an obnoxious stranger whose bad vibes are ruining the morning.
10 Nov. 5:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C4
Starring Jerry as Himself shakes up notions of traditional storytelling in a genre-bending mystery that centres on Jerry Hsu. Jerry is a loving father of three, a recent divorcé, and has been keeping a secret.
11 Nov. 2:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C4
A job interview, a children’s clothing store, a government registry office. These are just some of the everyday sites for which the characters of Terrestrial Verses must navigate cultural, religious, and institutional constraints imposed on them.
12 Nov. 2:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
Chloe Abrahams’ debut feature, is an enveloping, hypnotic, urgently personal meditation on family, memory, identity, violence, and love.
9 Nov. 5:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C4
Free-spirited 12-year-old Zaffan is the first of her friends to get her period and experience the body-changing horrors that come with puberty and menstruation.
11 Nov. 7:30 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
The Good Guise is an artist collective in Toronto formed to spark conversations around healthy masculinity.
11 Nov. 12:00 pm | TIFF Bell Lightbox C3
